Carroll and Kimball (1996) show that the consumption function for an agent with time-separable, isoelastic preferences is concave in the presence of income uncertainty. In this paper I show that concavity breaks down if we abandon time-separability. Namely, if an agent maximizing an isoelastic recursive utility has preferences for early resolution of uncertainty, there always exists a distribut...

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. The analysis indicates that marital-status transitions can have important effects on optimal household decisions, particularly in the cases of widowhood and divorce. Children also play a fundamental role in portfolio choice; in addition to leading to...

We study the optimal trading strategy of mutual funds that face both position limits and differential illiquidity. We provide explicit characterization of the optimal trading strategy and conduct an extensive analytical and numerical analysis of the optimal trading strategy. We show that the optimal trading boundaries are increasing in both the lower and the upper position limits. We find that ...

Extensions of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits have been implemented in response to the Great Recession. This paper measures the effect of these extensions on the unemployment rate using a calibrated structural model featuring job search and consumption-saving decisions, skill depreciation, and UI eligibility. The ongoing UI benefit extensions are found to have raised the unemployment rate ...

Using administrative data from a large public university, we show that male students are 18.6 percent more likely than female to receive favorable grade changes made by instructors. Surveys of and instructors reveal regrade requests prevalent ask for regrades on the intensive margin. We corroborate gender differences in an incentivized controlled experiment: find males have higher willingness p...

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position’s factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits potential of communication resolve conflict reduce polarization. We test this phenomenon in field setting, at international debating competitions randomly assign experienced motivated debaters one side topical mot...

We use variation in weather to study the long-term effects of activism during original Earth Day on attitudes, environmental outcomes, and children’s health. Unusually bad April 22, 1970 is associated with weaker support for environment 10 20 years later, particularly among those who were school aged 1970. Bad also higher levels carbon monoxide air greater risk congenital abnormalities infants ...

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value employment in refugee camps Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals field experiment with three arms: control arm, weekly cash and arm equal value. raises substantially more than alone, 66 percent employed are willing forgo payments continue w...

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, representative sample of the US and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about external validity experiments with participants. Behavior in population offers bounds on other populations, correlations between are similar across samples. Furthermore,...

Public recognition is frequently used to motivate desirable behavior, yet its welfare effects—such as costs of shame or gains from pride— are rarely measured. We develop a portable empirical methodology for measuring and monetizing social image utility, we deploy it in experiments on exercise charitable behavior. In all experiments, public motivates behavior but creates highly unequal payoffs. ...